Читать книгу Time and the Hour - Howard Spring - Страница 6

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That afternoon Chris trotted along Manningham Lane at the side of his father, a man he scarcely knew, and his cheeks would have been burning with shame had there been enough blood in them to warm a blush. Oh, God, he prayed, let none of the boys see him now! “We’ll stroll down to town this afternoon, Chris,” his father had said. “Be ready about four o’clock.”

The day had become duller. A gleam or two had brightened the air at noon while they were up on the moor, but now the overhead grey was flat and still, and the coldness had a hint of snow. It was the sort of day Chris liked when he and Mrs. Wyke had the house to themselves. After supper Mrs. Wyke would make up the fire and sometimes say: “Now, you be cosy, Chris. Sit you down and have a good read. Lucky, that’s what you are. Pity them that have to go out on a night like this.”

She would be putting on her bonnet and cloak, and Chris would say: “Do you have to go out, Mrs. Wyke?”

“Ay, that I have, my lamb.” (It made him writhe to be called my lamb, especially as he knew she didn’t mean it.) “There’s them as is coddled in this old world, and there’s them that have to be out come wind, come weather. But don’t waste your sympathy on me, my lamb. What is, is; and that’s a fact.”

He knew where she was off to, but it was part of the game that he should pretend he didn’t. “Don’t wait up for me. Put yourself to bed at ten. I’ve got my key.”

Longing for her to be gone, he would urge her to stay; and when at last the front door banged he would hug his solitude. Now the house was his and he could be what he liked: not Mrs. Wyke’s lamb, nor his father’s “My boy,” nor the hunted fugitive of the school playground. He had a great gift of identification, and a store of books—novels mostly—dealing with the lives with which he identified himself. Biographies were not so good. In them, men had ups and downs, and Chris had no use for downs. So he more and more sought out the tales of heroes before whom men cringed as they rode swift horses, or outwitted crafty Indian chiefs, or pleaded successfully in the courts, or stepped at a critical moment into a deadly breach. “Here’s Mandeville. Leave it to Mandeville. He’ll see us through,” the book would say. And Chris would read: “Leave it to Hudson.” The fire purred; the cat dozed on his lap; but around him stretched an arctic waste through which he lashed a team of huskies, hastening to the reserve depot for the food that would save the other members of the expedition. Frostbitten and grey-faced, the leader had taken his hand. “You alone can do it, Hudson. Our lives are in your keeping.”

One night, he did not put himself to bed at ten. He was up when Mrs. Wyke returned, opened the sitting-room door, and swayed on her feet, smiling at him amiably. “Oh, my lamb,” she said, “you still up!”

He shut his book, shifted the cat from his lap, and stood up, not saying a word. “Oh, my lamb,” Mrs. Wyke said weakly, “I got took.”

He went straight to bed without answering her.

Mrs. Wyke’s urgent affairs didn’t call her out into the night for some time after this. Chris was sorry. He liked his dream-life of action and mastery. But there came a night when Mrs. Wyke’s business could no longer be postponed. That night Chris was in bed by ten, and next day there was sixpence by his plate on the breakfast-table. He left it there. “You can’t bribe Hudson. No siree,” the Sheriff said. The sixpence appeared every morning for a week, and then no more. He was glad to have this evidence that she knew that he knew; gladder still that she had tried to bribe him. For the first time in his life he enjoyed the feeling of power.

But this was not to be one of his favourite nights. Mrs. Wyke would not go out while his father was at home, and here was his father suggesting a walk. Dutifully at four o’clock he presented himself in the sitting-room, and he was never to forget the sight that met his eyes.